Gerard Hoffnung The Hoffnung Music Festival Concert

The Hoffnung Music Festival Concert of 1956 owes it creation to an earlier attempt at establishing a musical festival. Frtiz Spiegl created the April Fools Concert in Liverpool, with Gerard Hoffnung a willing contributor, but sensing that such a format would work on a grander scale, Hoffnung hired the Festival Hall in London later the same year for his series of concerts. To call them an unqualified success does them something of an injustice. All 3,000 seats for the event sold out within two hours, and the great and the good of classical music proved themselves willing to be the butt of the jokes and mayhem that eventually occurred. There were to be three such concerts, with the first still regarded as the best.